28 0: =0 o p R o F I L E o " 0: 5 1- TOßACCO, TUNNELS, AR.SENIC, AND OLD LACE H OWARD S. CULLMAN, who . for the past four or five years has been New York's most relentless and most successful investor in Broadway shows, is a man of five or six ma- jor disparate occupational inter- ests, and it is doubtless a measure of his resourcefulness that so many of them dovetail. Thus Cullman the theatrical investor made it easy for Cullman the president of Beekman Hospital (a fìnancial- district outfit recently amalgamat- ed with a competitor into the Beekman-Downtown Hospital) to service its 1 942 Christmas chil- dren's party with a Mrs. Santa Claus in the person of Dorothy Stickney, then of "Life with Fath- er," a play in which Cullman had put $5,000; to furnish its 1943 Christmas party with Mary Martin, then of "One Touch of Venus," in which Cullman had put $11,500; and its 1944 event with Celeste Holm, then of "Bloomer Girl," in which Cullman had put $7,500. This last Christmas, Cullman, who can be objective at times, brightened up the lives of the Beekman kiddies with Gladys Swarthout, of the Metropolitan Opera Company, in which he has no stake whatever. The hospital's annual parties, held two or three afternoons before Christmas, are attended by hundreds of children living in the downtown section, mostly in Italian and Chinese neighbor- hoods. Cullman helps distribute toys and helps pass Martinis to his fellow hospital directors, many of them men from the neighborhood of Locust Val- ley. In similar fashion, C ullman the part- ner of Cullman Brothers, a New Yark tobacco firm which, among other things, grows cigar wrappers for approximately one out of every thirty-five of the six billion domestic cigars made annually, and which does a business of anywhere from ten million dollars a year in boom times to two million in depressions, has, acting on a family principle that all ven- tures be joint enterprises, insisted that Cullman the backer of plays make his Broadway investments through the to- o bacco company. The Cullman Broth- ers Cullman, whose firm controls a $6,000,000 investment trust called To- bacco and Allied Stocks, Inc., which dominates Benson & Hedges by virtue of ( qJ .. "- ... ".:;,..: - ::T >< .,:> , . Howard S. CuZZman a $2,000,000 interest, has also enabled Cullman the politicians' friend, who served as treasurer of all the gubernato- rial campaigns of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Lehman, to present both ex-Mayor LaGuardia and Governor Dewey with big assortments of high- priced Benson & Hedges cigars from time to time. LaGuardia, who used to send his chauffeur up to the store to exchange them for inexpensive stogies, which he prefers, finally had such a stockpile that he began to feel he might not live long enough to smoke his way through the Cullman largesse. "Dear Howard," he wrote Cullman last April. "You must stop sending me cigars! The last box I received from you, I sent to Bens.on & Hedges and got a box of 'stogies' that I like and fifteen dollars credit. Now here comes another box. I really cannot use them." Cullman didn't know what to make of this, and he took LaGuardia off his list. Now he is thinking of putting O'Dwyer on. Similarly, or perhaps conversely, Cullman the politicians' friend, who in 1926 was also treasurer of Robert F. Wagner's senatorial campaign, has en- couraged the Cullman Brothers Cull- man to write long letters to congress- men against tobacco-crop control. Cull- man, who smokes nothing but Benson & Hedges' Parliaments and Virginia Rounds, has given deep thought to the problems of the tobacco industry. A year ago January, in a letter to Senator James M. Mead objecting to a Depart- ment of Agriculture statement that the decline of cigarette sale,s to our troops after the German surrender would make an increase in tobacco crops unnecessary, he said, "Certainly at the cessation of hostilities men in the armed services will have more time to smoke." Two months later, Cullman wrote President Roosevelt objecting to the quota on imports of certain Cuban tobaccos. "My dear How- ard," the President replied on April 9th, in one of his last per- > sonalletters, "Upon investigation, "t.'f I find that [your] information is not entirely accurate." Cullman treasures thIs letter and likes to show it to friends. He was a suc- cessful gubernatorial-campaign treasurer, and Roosevelt was al- ways grateful to him. The Presi- dent once offered him the ambassador- ship to Chile, but Cullman, perhaps not wishing to move so far away from Beekman Hospital, declined. Between December, 1932, and Sep- tember, 1937, Cullman served first as receiver and then as trustee of the Roxy Theatre, a pleasure dome which had sunk deeply in to th e red as the re- sult of having been exuberantly over- capitalized. During this period, Cull- man the movie operator was persuaded by Cullman the people's friend, and possibly by Cullman the tobacco man, to permit smoking in the Roxy's bal- cony, theretofore out of bounds, and to arrange for the sale of cigars and ciga- rettes in the lobby, and Cullman the theatre man also occasionally persuaded Cullman the Port of New York Au- thority commissioner to offer the serv- ices of the Gae Foster Girls, the Salici Puppeteers, and other Roxy attractions to embellish such Port Authority vernIS- sages as the opening of the Lincoln Tunnel. Frank Ferguson, then the Authority's chairman, who is a Jersey City banker with only a moderate sense of the festive, invariably slapped these suggestions down. According to some of the Port Authority people, Cullman of- fered them chiefly in an effort to make things hum. "Howard's the most popu- lar commissioner ón the staff," one of them said recently. "He tries to dry tears rather than cause them and he tries to have meetings end on a hap- py note." Cullman, who has the vague, unseeing eyes of a Beerbohm caricature of Lord Rosebery and who looks like